The money contour carries a deal from the first estimate to the money received: the quote for the client, the invoice, the payment, the contract, the subscription. This is where the product is especially useful, because all of this work is a chain of small steps where it is easy to lose the thread: what was already sent, what is paid, who needs a reminder, what needs renewing. Every step is recorded and linked to its neighbors, so the chain does not break.
The product and service catalogue
It all starts with the catalogue: what you sell, at what prices and in what units. Products and services are gathered into categories (with a hierarchy too); every item has a unit of measure — piece, hour, month, license — and its own tax rate. The tax rate, like everything else, can be set once and reused: one of them is marked as the main one. An item with a sales history is not deleted but marked inactive — this way past documents stay understandable.
Units of measure can be linked to each other: it is known, for example, that a box holds 12 pieces. Then the product itself recalculates how many boxes the ordered quantity needs, and you do not have to count by hand.
Price books and price calculation
Different clients have different prices — that is normal, and it lives in price books: sets of prices tied to a client, a currency or a period. A book has entries per item with conditions: from which date the price applies, at which quantity a volume discount starts. At any moment you can ask “what price will this client get for this item” and get an answer by one rule, not by a manager’s guess.
The price-calculation rule is one for the whole product: first the price is taken from the book, then the discount rules apply, then the taxes. This matters because “one rule” means the same line gets the same price in the quote, in the order and in the invoice. There will be no discrepancies between documents.
Discount rules
Discounts are configurable too: “from ten pieces — minus five percent”, “special terms for this client”. Every applied discount has a log: it is visible by which rule this price came out. This settles the classic dispute “why did the client get it cheaper”: the answer lies right in the line — here is the price book, here is the rule, here is its contribution.
Quotes
A quote for a client is assembled from lines: a product or service, a quantity, a price. All totals recalculate automatically — line sums, taxes, the grand total — and it is always visible what each total is made of. Quotes carry sequential numbering and versions: if the terms were replayed, a new version is created and the old state stays untouched — so it is clear what exactly went to the client at which moment.
The agent can assemble a quote piece by piece itself: fill in the items from the deal, compute the price by the book, apply the discounts. Your part is to check and send.
Sending a quote
The quote goes to the client as an email holding a link to a public page with the document — a separate address available by a special key, without signing in. So the client opens the quote at any moment, and it is convenient: no file needs forwarding. The product notes that the email went out and whether the page was opened — meaning it is visible whether the quote arrived and whether it is interesting. The public page answers any wrong key with the same modest response, giving nothing away about the content.
Orders and fulfillment
When the client agreed, the quote turns into an order — a document of confirmed intent. The order has a clear life path: draft, sent, on hold, closed, cancelled, amended. How far the order is fulfilled and how far it is paid are shown separately — by two indicators computed over the lines: how much is already shipped and how much is invoiced. There are special order kinds too: blanket orders (a volume contract drawn down in parts) and shipment records.
Invoices, payments and offsets
From an order or a quote, an invoice is issued. The invoice has a state that is computed, not set by hand: draft, issued, partially paid, paid, overdue. The issuing moment is fixed: the amounts and rates in an issued invoice are frozen and are not “recalculated in hindsight”.
Payments can be entered partially and distributed over invoices — one payment can close several invoices. If money must be returned or the debt reduced, a credit note (a correction document) is issued, and the invoice balance recalculates: “issued minus paid minus corrected = remainder”. All these numbers sit next to each other, so it is always clear where the remainder came from. There are advances too — money up front waiting for their invoices.
Receivables and reminders
A separate contour answers the question “who owes us and how much”. The amounts are laid out by age (up to a month, one to two months, over ninety days and so on) — so it is visible at once where money is stuck seriously. Reminders to clients about a debt are arranged as a ladder: a soft reminder, then a stricter one, then the last resort. The ladder is configurable, and every step shows whether it fired and who got the email.
There are sensible fuses: for an important client the reminders can be suspended so the relationship is not spoiled, and per company you can set your own threshold “from this day we count it as overdue”. Suspended lines do not disappear from the report but are shown with the mark “suspended and why” — hiding them would be deception. And there is a cash-inflow forecast: when and how much is expected, with a probability estimate.
Credit limits
Selling on credit is ordinary business, but with a limit. For a client a ceiling is set — how much can be shipped to them without payment — considering the legal entity and the currency. When the limit is exceeded, the product warns, and in serious cases it does not let the invoice through. The rule can be bypassed — a manager’s decision with a mandatory reason — but that stays recorded. The same place holds the one page of “how much debt the client has piled up and why exactly that much”, where all the numbers meet: invoice balances, overdue amounts, the active rule.
Contracts
Contracts are gathered into a registry: with whom, for what term, on what terms, who is responsible. A contract has a validity period and a date by which the non-renewal must be announced — by these the product raises a signal in advance so a renewal is not slept through. The contract’s obligations are kept separately, turned into tasks with the needed rhythm: for example, “every month by the fifteenth, prepare the report”. A contract can be renewed, terminated or amended; all of it is recorded with a reason. Linked documents are attached to the contract: the contract itself, supplementary agreements, acceptance acts. Such a document is not deleted in the product but replaced by a new one — this way the signing history is kept.
From a contract a quote can be assembled again — when it is time to renew on new terms. And from a quote the client accepted, a contract is created the other way round. The chain is closed.
Subscriptions
If you sell by subscription — a monthly-paid service, for example — the product keeps the calendar of periods and issues the invoices itself. The main thing here is no duplicates: a repeated run of the calculation does not create a second helping of invoices for the same periods. Every period shows its own state: planned, invoiced, paid, with a link to the concrete invoice.
A subscription can be paused (the client froze the service) and resumed, and a change of terms in the middle of a period is counted honestly: one part of the period goes by the old price, the other by the new one, and it is visible. Terms can be prepared in advance as templates, so they do not have to be typed anew for every client.
Purchases and signature requests
There is a purchasing side too: supplier prices gather in one place, supplier quotes are compared with each other — it is visible where it is cheaper and on what terms. This helps not to overpay and to keep the history: “last time it was cheaper”.
A separate capability is the signature request: a document is sent for signature, and the product keeps its state: whom it went to, who signed, who has not yet. Honestly said: this is not a full legal electronic signature but careful state-keeping of the signing with history — the fact of signature itself stays with your usual procedures.
Bundles
Several products can be assembled into a bundle — a set sold as one whole with its own price. The bundle shows what it consists of and what happens if one of the parts is removed. This is a convenient way to sell “everything to launch” or “a year of support with hardware” kits without inventing a separate item for each.
Printing documents
Quotes, invoices, contracts and acts can be printed by your own templates. An honest reservation: the PDF is produced by the browser’s means — it is the printing of a prepared page, not a separate program drawing documents. For ordinary documents that is enough, and if a special typographic look is needed, the template will have to be tuned more carefully.
End-to-end links and analytics
The main value of the money contour is that the chain does not break: deal → quote → order → invoice → payment → contract → subscription. From any point you can walk the link to the neighbor and see the whole history. So the question “where does this number come from” always has an answer, and the reports are computed over this linkage: how many quotes reached payment, which products bring revenue, how much money is in flight and when the inflow is expected. All reports export as a spreadsheet.
All of this is the Money add-on.
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